In the early 1990s, I
met a lovely man called Ted Wells, a retired Church of
England minister. His last post had been as Vicar here at
St Nicholas, and he had been the incumbent at the time of
the church's redundancy in the early 1980s. He told me
that they had left the church exactly as it was after the
last evensong, the hymn books put neatly away on the
shelves, but the hymn numbers still up on the hymn board.
They walked out together, some in tears, and locked the
doors behind them, and that was that. The church just sat
there, waiting for someone to come and love it again.

On Historic Churches
Trust bike ride days, it was possible to visit St
Nicholas, and even ten years after redundancy it was
still like entering a working church. Only the people
were missing. You can see some photographs I took in the
autumn of 1999 here.

Care of the church was
vested in the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust, which had
been set up by the Ipswich Borough Council. The Trust was
well-meaning, but poorly funded; it did a good job, as
far as it could, and St Nicholas was carefully
maintained. The redundancies of other Ipswich churches
was not so fortuitous; the inside of St Lawrence was reduced almost
to a ruin; St Peter is also in a
poorly state inside. St Clement was full of junk
for decades until it caught fire. It has since been
restored very well. Up until the end of the century, the
only medieval church in Ipswich to have found a new use
was St Stephen, now the Tourist
Information Centre, run, ironically, by Ipswich Borough
Council itself. Perhaps St Nicholas got off lightly.

The alternative to the
Ipswich Historic Churches Trust solution was that care of
St Nicholas might have been handed to the Redundant
Churches Fund, now the Churches Conservation Trust, who
would have done an equally good job, no doubt. But there
would have been one important difference, as we shall
see.

St Nicholas stands
among the high-rise offices between the docks and the
town centre, in an area that 1960s planners foresaw as
the business district of an Ipswich that would eventually
be home to half a million people. Fortunately, they were
eventually taken away by men in white coats, and the area
has been developed with less brutal and lighter office
blocks. One of the best is next door to the church,
Churchgates House, and it was to here that, in the late
1990s, the Anglican Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich
moved its offices.

In the
Spring of 2001, the Diocese bought this church for the
princely sum of one pound. Having overseen its redundancy
barely twenty years earlier, you might think that the
Diocese had a bit of a cheek. But, like God, the Anglican
Diocese moves in mysterious ways. It was the same month
that the Diocese had sold Charsfield vicarage, apparently
against the wishes of the Charsfield PCC, for £475,000.
To read the Diocese's publication The Church in
Suffolk, you wouldn't know that there had been
anything at all controversial about these two actions.

If the
Churches Conservation Trust had cared for St Nicholas
during its redundancy, there would have been an onus on
the Diocese to pay the money back that had been spent on
St Nicholas during the redundant years. With the IHCT, of
course, no such onus existed. You'd expect the Diocese to
be slightly embarrassed about this, but no. "I am
particularly grateful to the Ipswich Historic Churches
Trust for their husbandry of St Nicholas", said
Nicholas Edgell, Diocesan Secretary, in the July 2001
edition of The Church in Suffolk. "Without
their care and maintenance of the church over the past
twenty years, this exciting project would not have been
possible". I suppose that he might have meant that,
had circumstances been different, the Diocese would not
have been able to add it to their property portfolio at
such a laughably small price.

Plans were
soon unveiled for St Nicholas. It would be converted into
a kind of conference centre; the Diocese would use it,
but it would also be available for outside users. Most
spectacularly, a glass link corridor would be put in
place from the east end of the south aisle into
Churchgates House itself. However, the church then stood
empty and boarded up for a number of years, attracting
vandals, especially on the Cromwell Square side which had
become a mecca for skateboarders.

Cromwell
is not the only famous name associated with this part of
Ipswich. Back in the 1470s, it may have been that a
butcher whose shop lay opposite the east wall of the
churchyard presented his baby for holy baptism at the new church
of St Nicholas. It would have been a highly symbolic and
moving occasion, as all medieval baptisms were, with the
administration of salt and saliva, oil and water, candles
and white garments. What would have been the most
memorable in later years for those present, though, was
that the baby grew up to be Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord
Chancellor of England.

There's
actually no evidence for this, but it is a good story,
and one that the Diocese used to promote interest in its
bargain purchase. "The new centre we are planning...
will make it a new focal point for the Church and
Business community in Ipswich", said Nicholas
Edgell.

Little
remains to show that the Wolseys were ever here. A
gateway barely survives at St Peter; it was the watergate entrance to
the unfinished college. There is a 1950s plaque on a
building in St Nicholas street to show where the shop may
or may not have been. The church which they may, or may
not, have known, is one of the smallest of the town
centre medieval churches, although the tower of 1886 by
Edward Bishopp competes well with the towering office
blocks that rise on every side. No expense was spared by
the Victorians in restoring it to a medieval glory
greater than it ever exhibited at the time. Bishopp's
finishing touch is a fine statue of St Nicholas sitting
in a niche at the top of the western face watching out
over the traffic.

The
pinnacled top, reminiscent of Suffolk's great cloth
churches, reflects boldly from the face of the famous
Willis Faber building. The equally famous Unitarian Chapel also looks across
the square, although houses filled this gap until the
1970s. There are curious dormer windows halfway along the
roof of St Nicholas, which we will come back to in a
moment.

Inside,
the church was almost entirely Victorianised in 1848.
This was a fairly low-brow restoration, before the full
flow of the Ecclesiological movement had reached Suffolk.
The 17th century pulpit survived, and during the course
of the century, attempts were made to enhance this early
restoration; when St Lawrence was restored in
the 1860s the font there was moved here. But St Nicholas
has always been most famous for some Saxon and Norman
reliefs, outstanding in a county that has virtually no
others of these.

In August,
2005, on the hottest day of the year so far, I went back
to St Nicholas for the first time in almost five years. I
enquired in the bookshop which now operates in the vestry
if it was possible to see in the church. The request was
met with a little surprise, but someone was dispatched to
'the offices' to find someone else to let me in. I had
assumed this person would appear carrying a set of keys,
but in fact this wasn't necessary; all we had to do was
to step behind the bookshelves that spill into the
chancel, and we were there.

Curiously,
these bookshelves hide the great treasures of the church,
the Saxon and Norman reliefs.

They stand
in the north wall of the chancel. Because of the
bookshelves, they are rather hard to photograph. One is
an ancient carving of St Michael fighting a dragon. What
makes it more interesting, however, is that it also bears
an Anglo-Saxon inscription: HER SANCTUS MICHAEL FEHT
WID DANE DRAGON. Given that St Nicholas was built in
the 14th century this relief must be at least 300 years
older than the church. To increase the interest even
further, we know that St Nicholas was built on the site
of an Anglo-Saxon church dedicated to St Michael. Almost
certainly then, this is a survival from the earlier
church. Incredibly, it was imbedded in the exterior of
the south wall until 1948.

Another
stone is semi-circular, almost certainly a tympanum from a Norman
door. It has carvings on both sides, on one an animal (a
boar?) feeding. The proportions suggest a date of about
1100, again before the current church. Roy Tricker
suggests it may be from the church of All Saints, which
stood on the road from London at Handford Bridge, site of
one of the three Saxon settlements from which Ipswich
grew.

Yet more
fragments show priests and deacons in their vestments
celebrating Mass. During the
mid-1990s the stones were removed to the Victoria and
Albert Museum for temporary exhibition; they were
returned, and were in situ when this church was
temporarily used for exhibitions by the Ipswich Art
Society in 1999, but there was some concern that the
museum might be their final destination. However, they
are still here.

The font
is a good one; the bowl features sixteen niches, two on
each panel, which were presumably painted at one time,
perhaps with Saints. The stem is supported by the four
Evangelists, each holding a scroll. This font would have
been a symptom of the glory of the medieval English
Catholic Church, of which every trace has been lost at St
Nicholas - or, that is to say, almost every trace.

Look up.
There are dormer windows, one on each side at the east
end of the nave. Instead of a clerestory, they were
designed to give added light to the great rood, a late
15th century reminder of the central mystery of the
Catholic faith. Cautley thought that the
exteriors were the original. They are not unique, but
they are very rare. It is a wonder they have survived,
when you think they are five hundred years old.

What do I
think of the conversion? Externally, everything is good.
I like the linking glass atrium, currently in use as a
coffee shop, a great deal. The bookshop is awkward,
spilling out as it does into the chancel. And the centre
itself? Well, elsewhere I have congratulated the Tourist
Information Centre on the way they have preserved so much
of the internal integrity at St Stephen while still making
it so much their own. Now, St Nicholas did not have such
an important interior as St Stephen, with the exception
of the priceless reliefs, but I couldn't help being
surprised that rather more had not been done with it.
Essentially, all that has happened inside is that the
pews have been removed and a temporary stage has been put
at the east end, blocking the view of the sanctuary. A
false floor was been put in to protect what I remember as
ten-a-penny 19th century tiles. Tables are laid out as if
for a wedding reception. Having criticised the way that
the conversion came about, I have to say that it could
have been so much worse. Perhaps the Ipswich Historic
Churches route was the best one after all, although it
cannot be hoped that there will be an equally
satisfactory solution for the other churches in its care.

Standing
in the new centre, I couldn't help thinking that it was a
lot like being in St Nicholas five years previously,
before all this happened. I wondered what Ted Wells made
of it, if he is still alive. Still the air of a Victorian
church in the shell of a medieval one, still the sense of
calm against the traffic outside. No open doors, but not
the business centre some had feared, nor, apparently, the
cynical attempt at a money-spinner some had predicted.

Not
exciting, then; but the intention is at least honourable.
Amen to that, if nothing else.